Break Your Personal Chains

Break Your Personal Chains

The failure to forgive people who offended us imprisons us to that person.  Each flash of resentment becomes another link in a chain that binds us to that person.  When we judge our victimizers, we create even more links.  Our periodic mental condemnation as we reflect upon our past produces additional links in the chains.  Today, Dr. Luke in his gospel encourages us to break these personal chains.  In the sixth chapter and thirty-seventh verse (Luke 6:37), the evangelist exhorts us: “Do not judge and you will not be judged.  Do not condemn and you will not be condemned.  Forgive and you will be forgiven.”  Accordingly, a refusal to judge and condemn and a willingness to extend forgiveness and mercy are the two most effective spiritual tools in breaking our personal chains.

Although we are believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, many of us walk around totally bound.  Our hearts are captive to the bitterness and resentment that we harbor against others.  Our thoughts are the fertile ground for revenge and judgmentalism.  Our reflections yield intense flashes of anger and thirst for vengeance.  We long for the day that our victimizers get exactly “what is coming to them.”  We simply cannot wait until our ears are satisfied with the “good news” that our enemies have reaped what they have sown.  We wish that we could be there to ask them, “How does it feel?”  Nonetheless, the sum of these emotions is a huge ball and a lengthy chain that incarcerate us to the past.  We, therefore, are not free to enjoy the abundant and eternal life that God offers us in Christ.

Renouncing judgment is the first tool that Luke suggests we use to break the chains that bind us.  “Vengeance is mine says the Lord.  I will repay.”  Galatians 6:7-8 assures us that God will determine the time and method in which our victimizers face the consequences of their actions.  In turn, we must relinquish our demands for retribution.  In order to break our chains, we must give a pardon to those persons who have harmed us.  That means that we free them from any punishment that we think they rightfully deserve.  Interestingly, in freeing them, we free ourselves and break the chains that bind us.

Secondly, we show mercy to our victimizers by realizing that they too are children of Almighty God.  It happens that they are broken, hurting, incomplete and self-centered people.  In an awkward way, victims of unrequited love find it necessary to visit that agony unto someone else in order to heal from the experience.  Because that have been taken for granted and their feelings and hearts were trampled upon in the process, they do the same to others in order to free themselves from having been the object of someone else’s self-centered living.  Yet, it is important to realize the profound role that people’s backgrounds play in their inability to commit to meaningful relationships.  In fact, childhood disappointment and emotional and psychological injuries deeply affect us.  Sometimes, we must wonder just how deep is this well.  Nevertheless, our acceptance of our brokenness should enable us to extend mercy to the broken people who hurt us out of their pain and agony.

Luke reminds us of the principle of reciprocity as it relates to forgiveness.  We cannot become the recipients of forgiveness unless we are first the givers.  You cannot have one without the other.  As we forgive those who harmed us, we refuse to wish them ill will or to assassinate their characters.  Again, we surrender any justifiable claims we have to insist upon their chastisement.  We let go of righteous indignation.  Moreover, we begin to pray for them.  We ask for God’s “good, pleasing and perfect” will to emerge in their lives.  We ask God to heal them and make them whole.  With such inner healing and spiritual maturity, they will learn to practice “The Golden Rule” and treat people, as they would like to be treated.  Loving forgiveness is the third major tool for breaking the chains that bind us.

Ironically, we must also ask for forgiveness from our victimizers!  Absolutely shocking!  Yet, it is true and spiritually necessary.  We mentally condescend to those persons who harmed us.  We carry around a lifetime of strife and hard-heartedness against them.  We pray for their destruction and failure.  We attempt to push them out of the grace of God.  We try to strip them of their God given inheritance as His children who rightly deserve all of the blessings that we seek.  In short, we demonize these people.  In turn, God requires us to forgive them and request their forgiveness in order to complete the reciprocal process of forgiveness.

We must seek the forgiveness of our victimizers because we fall prey to the temptation of hating them.  Hatred clearly violates all of the biblical teachings, the Law, the Prophets, the Gospels, the Wisdom literature and the Epistles.  God is love.  We cannot know love unless we know Him.  Further, we cannot love Him whom we have not seen if we refuse to love our brothers and sisters whom we see all of the time.  Our love must extend even to those persons who have harmed us.  Although they are broken, we must love them nevertheless.  We cannot hate them.  If we have or been tempted to do so, we must seek their forgiveness to the same degree that we demand that they ask for our forgiveness.

Renouncing judgment, abandoning a condemnatory attitude, showing mercy and giving forgiveness are the necessary tools for breaking the emotional and psychological chains that bind us.  Unless we make a concerted effort to utilize these spiritual tools each day, we remain locked up to our pasts.  Eventually, we will die in our existential prisons.  Our love, passion, creativity and spirituality will waste away.  Instead, God offers us the chance to freely and immediately escape from these prisons of our own making by using the spiritual keys of mercy and forgiveness to free ourselves.  Break your personal chains!